The Outsider (13 page)

She sat down in her rocking chair, with her shoulders rolled forward and her hands tucked between her knees, full of anticipation like a child. He watched her through half-open eyes.

“This is liable to hurt your ears some, but here goes. . . .” And he brought the metal tube back up to his mouth and blew on it, and that wonderful wailing filled the room.

Rachel closed her eyes and let the sound fill her. It was like the music the wind made. It yowled and roared. It shrieked to the heavens with joy. And when it ended, it trailed off with an eerie veil of sad moaning.

She breathed out a long, slow sigh. “Oh, that was such a wonderment.”

She opened her eyes to find him staring at her. “I only know that one tune,” he said, the words strangled and rough, as if he’d blown out all of his air through the harmonica. “But I could teach you to play it if you’d like.”

She straightened up with a start. “No, you mustn’t. Music played on worldly instruments such as your harmonica-thing—it isn’t allowed in the Plain and narrow life. It was very wicked of me to ask you to play it in the first place, and now I must ask you never to do so again. Not in my house. It’s against the rules.”

“What rules?”

“The rules we live by.”

He considered her words a moment, then he smiled his naughty-boy smile. “And I don’t suppose you’d want that fellow who goes around thinking he’s somebody to catch you breaking the rules.”

She shook her head, although she had to struggle hard to keep her face set serious.

She scooted forward in the rocker, with her fingers curled around the edge of the rush seat, beside her thighs. But she didn’t stand up. He was looking down at the harmonica in his hand. His hair was mussed from the pillows and there was the lingering flush of fever on his cheeks. He looked roguish and rowdy, and a little lonely.

Slowly he lifted his head. He seemed to be searching for something to say to her, as if he was the one this time who felt the need to break the silence that kept falling between them.

“What’s that delicious baking smell?” he finally asked.

“A snitz pie. Do you like it?”

“I might if I knew what it was.”

“It’s a pie made of dried apples and spices. I’m baking it for my Benjo, to make up to him for the way you scared him this morning. He ran off like he does sometimes, when he’s troubled, but he’ll come back when he’s good and hungry, and then I’ll have a snitz pie fresh out of the oven for him.”

“It’s a wonder to me where you found the time to bake a pie. Just lying in here and listening to you work through this day has got me plumb exhausted. I’ve never known a woman for going from one chore to another like you do.”

“Hunh. Obviously you’ve never been married, Mr. Cain.
Otherwise you’d know that every woman’s day is pretty much as busy as mine.”

She’d never seen a person’s face change so fast. She thought she caught a flash of something in his eyes, the echoes of a bleak sadness long ago put away, then there was nothing.

Now she was the one struggling to fill the silence. “Besides,” she said, “idleness is the cause for all sorts of wickedness in this world. Satan has great power over the idle to lead them into many sins. King David, for example, was lying idle on his rooftop, when he fell into adultery.”

Perhaps that had not been quite the thing to say. But the bleakness had left his face; he seemed amused with her again.

“Do you never sin, Mrs. Yoder?”

“Of course not.” She felt herself flush a little. “Well, I don’t go out of my way to do it.”

“I do.”

“You do?” she asked, astonished.

“Uh huh. I go far, far out of my way to sin. So far I can practically smell the hellfires burning.”

He was teasing, surely. She had discovered that he enjoyed teasing. He was like Ben in that. He—

Thin wisps of black smoke trailed like mourning ribbons through the air.

“Judas Iscariot! My pie!” she shouted, pushing so hard to her feet that the back of the rocker smacked against the wall.

As she ran from the room she heard him laughing.

T
HE OUTSIDER STOOD ON
Rachel Yoder’s porch with one leg bent, the sole of his boot propped on the wall, and one thumb hooked in the leather cartridge belt that hung heavily from his hips. His hat cast his face in shadow, and his whole body looked relaxed and lazy. Yet there was a crackling anticipation to the air around him, like on a hot summer’s afternoon just before a lightning storm.

At the sight of him on her porch, Rachel’s steps faltered. She was already out of breath from chasing the ewes from the feeding paddock back into the pasture. Now, suddenly seeing him standing there, dressed and wearing his gun, she felt her heartbeat give a hitch.

She crossed the yard toward him, passing through the deep shadow cast by the barn. The morning frost crackled beneath her shoes. At the bottom of the steps she stopped and looked up at him. His hat brim hid his eyes, and his mouth was set hard. She mounted the first step, but couldn’t manage the next.

“Lady, them sheep ’pear to have got you running every which way out there,” he said, and he smiled.

She blew out a startled breath. She wasn’t sure what she’d expected—that because he’d suddenly willed himself well enough to get out of bed, he’d be coming after her now with his six-shooter blazing? And after all the work he’d done to
charm her, too. Why, if the man knew it, he’d probably be disappointed in himself.

She climbed the rest of the way onto the porch. “Sometimes I think it would be easier to get that creek to go where I want it than those confounded woolly monsters. I should’ve brought along a tin dog.”

He thumbed his hat back. “A tin dog? What’s wrong with the dog you got? Beyond his propensity for rabbit chasing, that is.”

She lifted a strip of baling wire, which was hung with a half dozen empty milk cans, from where it dangled over the porch rail. “A tin dog,” she said, and she gave the noisemaker a vigorous shake. The sheep, which were bunched up against the pasture gate, whirled and took off as fast as they could for the safety of the cottonwoods.

The outsider laughed, a sound rich and thick.

For a moment Rachel stared at him in wonder. There he stood, a bullet wound in his side, his arm all bound up in a sling and a Colt revolver hanging deadly off his hips, a hard-jawed man, laughing at a bunch of witless sheep. He made Rachel feel a dizziness in the pit of her belly just to look at him, the kind of feeling she’d get as a little girl when she’d hang upside down by her knees from a tree limb.

“You shouldn’t be out of bed, Mr. Cain,” she said.

“Another day spent lyin’ on my back countin’ the knotholes in the rafters and I’ll end up crazier than the bedbugs.”

“There are no bugs in my bed!”

He scraped a hand over his beard-roughened jaw. The way his eyes crinkled at the corners, she suspected he was hiding a grin. “Show me who’s been sayin’ there is, and I’ll call him a pernicious liar. No, ma’am, that bed in there is sure enough clean, and it’s soft, too. But it’s lonesome, real lonesome.”

She had to tangle her hands up in her apron to keep from pressing them to her hot cheeks.
Lonesome.
It was indecent, what he’d said, and wicked.

But then she wondered if maybe the wickedness wasn’t all in her own head, if maybe she’d added a meaning to his words that wasn’t there. She rarely sensed anything heartfelt behind what he said or did, only a detached calculation. She wondered what he saw when he looked at her, wondered what he thought of her. And surely it was wicked to have such thoughts. Rachel Yoder thinking she was somebody.

He pushed himself upright, his boot hitting the floor with a soft thud. He stepped further out onto the porch, until he was standing almost on top of her. He was taller than she’d thought him to be. Taller and with a look of elegance about him, with his fine gabardine trousers tucked into glossy black leather boots, his black Stetson hat and bottle green vest and . . . Ben’s shirt. He was wearing Ben’s shirt.

He noticed what she was looking at. “I found everything but my shirt, so I helped myself to one of your husband’s. If it hurts you to see me in it . . .”

She came to herself with a start and shook her head hard. “No, no. As if such a thing would matter. It was stained and torn beyond salvation—your own shirt, I mean.” Torn by a bullet, stained by his blood. His shirt had little tucks and pearled buttons set in the bosom, and a choker collar. The shirt he had on now was collarless and buttonless and tuckless. “I’m afraid you’ll have to dress partly Plain for the time being, Mr. Cain.”

“Well now, I’m not sure as how my reputation can stand that,” he said, drawling the words. “I’m pretty much known far and wide as a man with a certain
tawdry
appeal.”

She felt a smile pull at her mouth and fought it back.

He turned, a bit unsteady, so that he had to fling out
his good arm for balance. “Would it inconvenience you if I brought a chair out here? I thought to take a little sun, but I don’t reckon after all that I can do it on my feet.”

Earlier this morning, when she’d changed the dressing, his wound had still looked angry and sore. And after all, he’d been two weeks in bed, consumed with fever a good part of the time. She wasn’t surprised he was feeling unsteady.

“You shouldn’t be up at all,” she said. “What Doc Henry will think, I can’t begin to imagine.” Yet even as she was protesting, she was passing through the open door into her kitchen, fetching one of her spindle chairs for him. She thought if he was going to be inflicting his disturbing presence on the world, she’d rather have him doing it out here than in her house.

As she came back out onto the porch, he took the chair from her hands and put it flush up against the wall. He lurched again when he went to sit in it, so that she had to help him, and for a moment they were side by side, her arm around his waist. But then he was in the chair and she had taken a step back from him.

He leaned his shoulders against the unpeeled cottonwood logs of the house and lifted his face up to the sun. The wind caught at her skirt, dark and heavy with frost, slapping it against his shiny black boot. He looked so worldly sitting there, so different from what she was used to. It was too bad he’d ruined his shirt. Ben’s shirt stood out on him the way a wild thistle would stick out in a tulip bed.

She wondered if his soul had also been torn and stained beyond salvation.

RACHEL’S SKIRTS SWAYED
as she whipped the lather brush around and around the shaving mug, working up a thick
foam. From his position in the chair on her porch, the outsider was casting a concerned look up at the whirling white bristles. “Are you riled at me, Mrs. Yoder?”

Rachel whipped the lather brush even harder. “Ought I to be, Mr. Cain?”

“Heck, I don’t know. A man never knows. And now that I’ve had a chance to think some more on your kind offer to give me a shave . . .” He stretched out his neck and rubbed his hand over the scruffy beard under his chin. “Well, the regrettable fact is, ma’am, that in my experience it ain’t wise to allow a riled woman to get paired up with anything pointed or sharp.” He gave her his teasing smile. “You know what they say about the snakebit man being scared of a rope.”

“Myself, I haven’t had all that much experience with snakes, Mr. Cain.” Rachel wrung out a huck towel she’d had soaking in a basin of steaming water. “But the more regrettable fact—regrettable to you, of course—is that riled or not I am already paired . . .” She unrolled the towel with a snap of her wrists. “. . . up with a warranted Perfection razor that is sharp enough to split the hair on a frog.”

With that she slapped the hot cloth down over his face, smothering his startled yelp.

Truth be told, she was more than a little nervous to be doing this, even though she’d had some practice. Although Plain men grew thick, flowing beards on their chins, they still had to shave their cheekbones, upper lips, and necks. One winter, Ben had been felled by a grippe that left him too weak to do the chore himself, so Rachel had done his shaving for him, to keep him pure in the sight of God.